Pavan Hosur on Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis

Imagine walking deep into a dense forest without a map or GPS. Initially, you kind of know where you started. But as you wander further, eventually, it's impossible to tell where you came from — every direction looks the same. That's thermalization. The initial state's details get scrambled across all degrees of freedom and as a result local observables settle into a stable, time-independent state called the equilibrium state. The fact that macroscopic objects equilibrate with their env...